Stunning 7” (plays at 33) from Matt Earle of Breakdance The Dawn/Craft Bandits/xNoBBQx etc....with individually handmade sleeves. As with a lot of Matt’s work, it’s difficult to work out what he is actually doing here, though there are spurts of free percussion, alternately scratchy/ululating eternal drones, factory sounds ala Joe Jones, deformed, endlessly echoed vocals that sound like they’re being recorded from the bottom of a well... the second side is more recognisably based around amp destruction and guitar abuse with waves of crude feedback interrupted by percussive guitar wrangling ala The Dead C at their most extended (think the coda from “Outside”). No one makes rock music that is quite as unrecognisably fucked up and satisfyingly alien as Matt Earle and this is another righteous fist up the wazoo of musical conservatives everywhere. Recommended.

Massive two-header that upgrades a pair of killer sides from Australia’s sainted Breakdance The Dawn cabal, finally making vinyl editions available of some of the most supremely out rock/roll cut anywhere on the planet circa now: Girls Girls Girls is the amazing Brisbane based trio of Matt Earle of Craft Bandits/xNoBBQx etc on drums and electronics, Adam Park of Sprot on bass and Rohan Holiday of Kitten Party/Teen Sex on guitar. Together they play a radically dilated form of avant garage with creepy, minimal guitar lines over questing, brokedown bass and staggered rhythms. Some massively crankled motorik almost-grooves on this one, if you can imagine the Corwood recording that never came out on Flying Nun then you’re at least close but even more distressed, with single notes creeping along the fretboard like a narcoleptic Magic Band or early Royal Trux while the bass blows feedback at the drums and Earle falls down the stairs in slow motion. This is fractured avant blues at some kind of non-musicianly apex. As Matt Earle puts it: “together we are great like the gentlemen of Brisbane underground rock 'n' roll... there’s all these girl bands here at the moment and they’re all great but they won’t let us jam with them so we started our own.” Edition of only 250 copies in silkscreened sleeves, highly recommended! X Wave take a more martial approach to punk/rock, coming over like The Afflicted Man playing Spacemen 3’s “Losing Touch With My Mind” while making with massively thuggish/F/X drenched jams that give the nod to Japan’s Minor scene (Rotting Telepathies/Gasaneta et al) while they attempt to rip “Teenage Kicks” from the hands of The Undertones with nothing but a buncha wrong notes. Indeed, this feels closer to the original breakout rock/roll urge than any generic pretender, freaking with it in an intuitive high-energy style that has few parallels. If your idea of ‘the canon’ has more to do with Harry Pussy, Arthur Doyle, The Shaggs and Mars than some longhair weeping into his soundhole then this is where you plug in. Breakdance The Dawn has been the secret underground rock label of the past goddamn decade and it’s only now that the rest of the world is catching up. So don’t be a goddamn dweeb: this is rock ‘n’ roll. Edition of only 250 copies in silkscreened sleeves, highly recommended!

Great set of electric ritual/blurry drone rock from the Australian trio of Matt Earle (Breakdance/xNoBBQx/Craft Bandits et al), Rory Brown and Adam Sussmann (2779/Emotional About The Rainbow et al): Matt describes this one as sounding “like Miles Davis wit da Skaters in the blue mountains” and that’s pretty spot on, with the kind of expiring brass that illuminated Heathen Earth situated in the kind of drone torrents more commonly associated with the Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda. The ululating percussion is particularly hypnotic as is the smoky production style, with a John Godbert-era Vibracathedral Orchestra feel given that classic edge-of-the-world Breakdance production style.

Wild quartet art brut from Australia: two guitars, vocals and bass piloted through a rapidly collapsing universe by a bunch of fists who have done more to upset and bolster traditions of rock freak than anyone else down under, with Matt Earle of Breakdance The Dawn and Sumugan Sivanesan on guitars, Nick Dan (xNoBBQx) on bass and vocals and Anthony Guerra (Black Petal) on drums. Post-Harry Pussy/Shaggs/Guys N Dolls-style disobedient rock brut, highly recommended. Pink vinyl w/insert and etched disc.

New jams from this ‘primitive techno’ unit featuring Matt Earle of Craft Bandits and Nicola Morton of Bad Intentions et al: wild, low-level electro tectonics that combine the spluttering hands-on appeal of the more tape-damaged end of the Blood Stereo/Prick Decay axis combined with homemade experiments in dub using wonky circuitry and soldering irons. Imagine a chopped and screwed series of early Atari game soundtracks manhandled with alla the shortwave violence of a Voice Crack w/occasional FM Ferarro-isms and you are some of the way there. More profoundly out haunted drone/percussion hypnotics from two of the deepest thinking ton scientists on the Australian underground. Recommended.

“Cool sidestep militant boogie jams” the label sez, and they ain’t wrong: Rasheed play what sounds like The Velvet Underground’s “Guess I’m Fallin’ In Love” as stomping monochord boogie, dredging Hooker N Heat style scorch for maximum power chord friction and positing the eternal riff as the keys to the goddamn kingdom. Think the whole Numbers Band/Sweet Kelley/Jessie Mae Hemphill continuum re-thunk w/post-BDTD aesthetics and set the controls for the heart of the jam.

Wild new jams from the primitive ‘techno’ outfit featuring Matt Earle (Breakdance/Craft Bandits/xNoBBQx et al) and Nicola Morton (Wardenburger): minimalist throbbing electro-threat in the tradition of Vanity Records, Two Daughters, John Fothergill’s United Dairies off-shoot etc with automatic/modulated female vocals over druggy keyboard feedback and waves of lapping electricity: “our synth and drum machines were under water for three days in the Brisbane floods, they were given to us to prevent us from self harming. It gave them a unique sound. Wet, dirty and about to set the building on fire.” – Matt Earle. Minimal beats, almost translucent angel vox, think Henry & Hazel Slaughter erasing Aphex Twin’s Ambient Works with homemade electronics and a mouthful of magnets. Fantastic.

Private press LP in an edition of only 150 copies from Matt Earle of Breakdance The Dawn/Craft Bandits/xNoBBQx etc....with classy paste-on handmade sleeves. As with a lot of Matt’s work, it’s difficult to work out what he is actually doing here, though there are spurts of deformed F/X, alternately scratchy/ululating eternal drones, factory sounds ala Joe Jones, deformed, endlessly echoed vocals that sound like they’re being recorded from the bottom of a well... the second side is more recognisably based around amp destruction and guitar abuse with waves of crude feedback interrupted by massive dooms of guitar wrangling ala The Dead C at their most extended (think the coda from “Outside”). No one makes rock music that is quite as unrecognisably fucked up and satisfyingly alien as Matt Earle and this is another righteous fist up the wazoo of musical conservatives everywhere. Very highly recommended.

“Mark Sadgrove and Anthony Guerra are a pair of Australasian transplants currently based in Tokyo, Japan. Iron Sand is a series of electric guitar duets illuminated with harp, electronics, vocals and acoustic strings. Both players work minimal repeating shapes into nagging, emotionally insistent cells of smudged tone that re-visit the same territories again and again, as if to force a gentle confession of significance from the same two or three staggered notes. And it works. There’s something of Loren Connors’ foggy, late night style to the sound of the guitars, with washes of silver strings and solitary single notes left suspended in space. But whereas Connors uses variously amplified techniques in order to access the kind of highly-articulate zone where music and speech blur into one, Sadgrove and Guerra opt for re-statements of the most simplistic musical phonetics in order to access hypnagogic states. This is a magical, delicate recording, where minimal guitar lines interact with roaring analogue silence to create a music that somehow manages to combine stark, auraless playing with a deep, psychedelic atmosphere.” – David Keenan/The Wire.

Drums/guitar duo splurge recorded live in Sydney, Australia on 2nd January 2005 that works trashed fuzz and fists of percussion into a post-Vampire Belt tribute to Sound Of Confusion-era Spacemen 3. Fuck!